You've probably all seen Soma's announcement that the 2008 suite of products officially shipped this morning. Good luck downloading -- our servers are pegged :) If you plan to use VS 2008 with SourceSafe, make sure to pick up the Update CTP too. Without...

I'm very pleased to announce that the wait is over. Today the first official update for SourceSafe 2005 went live on the web . Download away -- it's only 3.5MB. To quickly bring new readers up to date: this update is a rollup of 64 VSS bug fixes . We...

My post about VS 2008 and the SourceSafe CTP generated lots of questions . I'll do my best to answer all of them. Q: Why wasn't this information in the VS2008 README? A: It should have been. It was definitely in the Orcas Beta1 and Beta2 READMEs. I haven...

I'm a big fan of the work Brian Harry has done to make our processes more transparent. Nevertheless, to badly misquote one of my other bosses, "transparency for the sake of transparency is soo 2006." I chuckled again writing this, because there's a grain...

Solution Explorer isn't working the way I expect. How do I fix it? In TFS, the answer is usually quite simple, because TFS uses workspaces to do most of the dirty work. So if you're familiar with our workspace model, a quick behind-the-scenes tour of...

Resolving merge conflicts is hard enough already. Which branch is "target," again? Unfortunately there's a bug in v1 that makes it even harder. If you select multiple conflicts in the main Resolve dialog... ...then you get this abomination: Yikes! Allow...

Amid all the furor over Whidbey SP1 and the forthcoming Vista GDR , there hasn't been any statement on what it all means for SourceSafe users. Rest assured we have some official KB articles in the works. But I think it's important to share this info with...

One thing that's missing from PowerShell is the ability to import foreign namespaces into the current context. That leads to a lot of typing at the interactive prompt and bloated hard-to-read lines in your scripts. For example, even if you've loaded the...

It's finally here! Our first real guidance on branching & merging has been posted, on a Codeplex wiki no less. I reviewed several drafts of the paper, but the real credit goes to Mario for driving our (the product group's) side of the process. Congrats...

When I updated Buck's TFS macros for Outlook 2007 , I neglected to demonstrate how they were installed. Enough has shifted around in '07 that the question has come up a few times. Let's burn some bandwidth. 1) go to Tools -> Macro -> VB Editor....

Just a quick note to let you know that I've updated the list again. To recap: you can get fixes #1-57 today via the CTP build. English only, I'm afraid. The final GDR ships later this year in all supported languages (English, Japanese, French, Italian...

I've noticed a lot of customer confusion around SP1. None of the information below is new -- anyone could piece together the same recommendations by dissecting the various READMEs, release notes, blogs, etc. -- but I think there's value in collecting...

As promised , we finally have some guidance around structuring team projects. What can you do within a team project? What can you migrate between projects? Which settings are global, which are scoped only to Team Projects, and which can be broken into...

Last time we learned that the principle objects in the source control system are called Items, and a few of their basic properties. That was awhile ago so let's recap: Items are unique . They have an ID that no other item does. Items are versioned . Like...

One of the changes made between VSS 6.0 and 2005 was to replace ancient file dialogs with common dialogs from the Windows Shell wherever possible. Check out the 6.0 version of Set Working Folder : It just screams "Win 3.1", complete with floppy diskette...

I want to expand on the Microsoft support lifecycle policy I mentioned before. To reiterate, VSS 2005 gets "mainstream" support for quite some time while 6.0 will enter "extended" this July. I won't repeat everything in the support doc (read it!). Bottom...

Let's recap Items one more time. Items are unique . They have an ID that no other item does. Items are versioned . Like all version control systems, TFVC is about making it easy to store successive versions of the same item and retrieve old ones when...

When you run Get on a folder (aka project) in VSS Explorer, you're presented with these options: (if you don't get this dialog, try holding Shift) Most of the options are obvious, but not "build tree" -- at least not to me. The online help explains it...

All tf.exe commands return one of these: public enum ExitCode
{
Unknown = -1,
Success = 0,
PartialSuccess = 1,
UnrecognizedCommand = 2,
Failure = 100,
}
You should never see -1 . Code 2 is only for the very specific case where you mistype...

We finally have a name. Last time I blogged about the future of SourceSafe , I had to constantly refer to "the next servicing release." No more. That next release will officially be a "GDR" -- and it's coming sooner than you think. Some brief history...

We use version control to store stuff. What stuff? A bunch of items , the most basic elements of TFVC. In everyday parlance, an item is a file or a folder. TFS rarely makes a distinction between files and folders; they are stored as rows in the same table...

Command Line usage In Source Control Explorer, you're always operating on pending space. At the command line, it's less clear. Consider the following setup: you're working in a directory $/project that's mapped to c:\project and contains two files a.cs...

When I upgraded to OL2007, Buck's great little macros stopped working. Today, I finally got the guts to ask the Outlook guys what they broke improved. The answer was simple enough. I'll let the code do the talking: Sub LinkToWorkItem() Set oDoc = ActiveInspector...

A recent request : "I want to be able to add a label to all files that were modified/added/whatever as part of a changeset." Sounds like a job for PowerShell! function label- changeset ( [ string ] $ serverName , [ string ] $ labelName , [ int ] $ changeset...

Personally, I've never had a problem simply ignoring the features I don't need. Nevertheless, this is a frequent request. If you're sick of waiting 10 minutes every time you want a new top-level folder, Paul Hacker has a solution for you: Empty Process...